Also, the pink should be labeled 'reality.' I'm sorry dude, you can scream from the highest mountaintop and pick pinks even pinker than that. It still makes you a bizarre outlier.

But yeah, schildy, you are right as usual. I am some sort of rare MMO gamer. Someday my kind will be extinct probably, huh? I think otherwise, and I'm guessing as people realize they are stuck on easy mode servers they may take the plunge into PVP and like it. It's slowly happening already. Even with WoW, where it is SLIGHTLY less FFA the PVP servers were heavily populated and desired by people buying characters.

It's been 12 years since UO, Slay. There has been PVP since the VERY beginning of MMO's 30 years ago with MUDs, and in pretty much every major release since then. There isn't going to suddenly be a cultural revolution.

« Last Edit: June 14, 2008, 08:11:01 AM by Murgos »

"You have all recieved youre last warning. I am in the process of currently tracking all of youre ips and pinging your home adressess. you should not have commencemed a war with me" - Aaron Rayburn

Wow, how come the AoC official boards aren't a total wall of evil noisesuck? I mean that was downright civil. That wasn't even the EU forum was it?

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.-William Gibson

I should get back to nature, too. You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer. Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached. Buy a car with only two cup holders or something.

The current implementation of stealth in any given MMO is invisibility. This is bad for PvP.

…

What? I have to justify that?!

Giving a minority of players complete invisibility (in the form of a “stealth” ability) on the battlefield, heavy burst damage, large positive modifiers to already massive damage dealt from stealth, a range of instant escape tools that are difficult-to-impossible to counter by a majority of players, and excellent survivability out of stealth is foolhardy.

Would you rather play a class that can do heavy damage at range, but cannot see his target, or one that can do equivalent melee damage to targets who cannot see him until he has already incapacitated them? Would you rather play a class that can take a beating, or one that can choose which fights to enter and escape at a whim if things get too rough? It would be stupid to choose the former in both cases. Stealth coupled with the assorted survival tricks designers normally grant stealth classes will determine the outcome of nearly any PvP engagement.

I am not saying that stealth/invisibility should not exist within the context of massively multiplayer PvP; I am saying that giving any player stealth who also has combat functionality beyond stealth, such as damage or healing, is radically overpowering that player to the point where hostile interactions with other players cannot possibly be balanced.

My solution to the problem of stealth — some of you may not agree that it is a problem; oh well — is to completely eliminate it as a special ability. In my ideal MMO, in which people run around on the ground and occasionally take flight but are still affected by gravity pulling them toward the ground, as opposed to EVE Online, in which people fly around incomprehensibly vast expanses of empty space with no discernable vertical boundaries, combatants function just as they do in Real Life. If Real Life had magic. Which could not make one invisible.

Stealth tactics, in this ideal world of mine, are Counter Strike tactics. If you don’t want to be seen, hide. If you want to set up an ambush, find a choke point and hide in some bushes. Unless a player is blind and deaf, it ought to be exceedingly difficult to ambush him in the middle of the [insert generic compound fantasy name here] Salt Flats.

To that end, you cannot see the names of a non-friendly player unless you specifically target that player. There are no giant rainbow-colored names and guild tags floating above hostile heads to mark exactly where they are (just in case you missed the eight-foot bull-man with flaming watercoolers on his shoulders charging your position).

In my mind, an ability that can be a tactic instead should always be. Yes, this means that everybody can “stealth.” Is that really such a bad thing?